Central Oregon YIMBY

Some things need to be designed with minute precision or they simply will not work. Computer chips, for instance, require incredible amounts of labor to ensure they function correctly. Once they are designed and built, they are done. No more changes. New revisions or a next generation might build on older work, but the new product needs to be retested and revalidated all over again.

Ecosystems

Whychus Creek, near Sisters, Oregon was the site of one of the earliest settlements of people of European descent in central Oregon, Camp Polk Meadow. As settlers moved into the area, they worked to “tame” the creek, making it more conducive to their needs – and less so to native flora and fauna, which in turn had repercussions for a broader area.

In recent years, the land has been set aside as a nature reserve, and work has been done to restore the creek to something more like its original state.

The creek is at the center of a complex ecosystem that people are capable of influencing and altering. However, in an ecosystem, one change can lead to another and lead to unexpected outcomes that are difficult or impossible to plan for. Even the ‘tamed’ creek could behave unpredictably.

Both the settler’s changes and the restoration changed certain aspects of the creek and surrounding area, but total control of an ecosystem is impossible.

The ecosystem displays “emergent” behavior, where the interaction of all components is something that cannot be predicted from how each individual component behaves.

Urban Design

Many people have a view of cities as closer to the computer chip than the creek and its surrounding ecosystem, but in a lot of ways, cities are closer to the ecosystem.

Certainly there are things we can and should shape and plan for in cities, like having a flexible, adaptable street grid, selecting locations for schools, and setting aside land for parks. Those are all things that are more difficult to retrofit if they aren’t done before other things go in. We should also attempt to foster an urban ecosystem that provides for people’s day to day needs close to where they live.

However, cities are impossible to design and plan with chip-like precision. And even where a design might be close to “perfect” for a given point in time, cities change, needs change, the economy changes, and if you are playing catch up via long, drawn out processes to alter some bit of land use code, you are losing out on what that flexibility might have provided.